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Article: Developing Experienced Recruiters; Part 1 by Steve Finkel

Part 2 of this article will be in next week's newsletter.

What strategy should a manager employ in today’s improving-but-still-not-good market?

Clearly, there can be significant positives to adding to staff. Nevertheless, there are risks as well, and most firms would probably be better off simply improving their existing staff. Yet how is this to be done in the face of resistance to change from experienced recruiters?

Several months ago, a reader contacted this author with a not-uncommon problem. While he owned the finest training products in our industry, they sat, as he said, “on the shelf”, while his group of experienced search consultants continued to repeat errors and limit their production, showing questionable improvement. He questioned why this was the case.

Reality

This a not uncommon problem. There are a number of excellent motivational products available, from the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill to Larry Nobles’ 3-tape audio series “Success Behavior”. Everyone should be exposed to these outstanding works or their imitators.

Nevertheless, the reality is that most people – in the absence of a truly life-changing event – are not self-motivating beyond a certain point. The fault in this instance lies solely with the manager. To let excellent training products “sit on the shelf”, as he says, and expect the non-self-motivated to improve is about as likely to yield results as purchasing exercise equipment for a non-motivated spouse. Improvement by osmosis is highly unlikely. Does this mean there is no hope? Of course not. But it requires personal involvement and work from the manager.

A Culture of Learning 

The manager shapes the organization. He develops the corporate attitudes. He forms the culture. If products simply sit and it is left to each recruiter to utilize as he or she sees fit, this sends the clear message that continued learning is an individual responsibility, and thus an option. That message is wrong. Professional growth is not an option, and not individual. It is a permanent on-going responsibility of the entire firm. But it is the manager’s responsibility to develop a plan – and to enforce that plan – to bring it about.

The Key 

The plan itself embodies four elements, and they will be discussed in this article and Part 2 in the next issue. But the key to these elements is group meetings which cannot be interrupted. To allow calls to be taken during meetings addressing skill improvement is to send a message that these meetings are not of the highest priority, and to reduce the quality of the meeting. Eventually, everyone will be filtering in and out of skill improvement sessions, reducing the focus and concentration of the entire group.

These skill improvement sessions should be conducted twice-a-week, in the morning, and not on Fridays. A rough estimate of length might be 30-45 minutes.

Topics

The difficulty many managers have is arriving at topics and organizing the material. Without sufficient preparatory work, they simply pick a subject and blindly stumble into it the morning of the meeting, relying on their recruiters to bail them out of their lack of structure by making contributions. This is rarely productive – and totally unnecessary.

In point of fact, there is no need for a manager to flail about wildly seeking subjects or specifics, as the outline of our industry has long been established and codified, and since broadened and refined.
The superb foundational training book by Larry Nobles, Search and Placement! (www.larrynobles.com or on Amazon US) contains 28 chapters. This author’s own hardbound book Breakthrough! contains 30 chapters. 

Each of these high-content sections plus selected chapters from the best generic books on selling is repeatable, reviewable, relevant – and should be the foundation of solid sales meetings to improve skills and production.

For those recruiters who claim to be too advanced to learn, a quotation from an early manager of this writer should draw quick acknowledgement. “No one is smart enough to remember all he knows!”

... continued after the Jobs in Recruitment section

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